The real cost of a cheap website (and what it costs later)

A cheap website is easy to spot after the fact: it's the one that needed a full rebuild eighteen months later because it couldn't handle a feature the business now actually needs, or because whoever built it is no longer reachable.

The upfront price of a website mostly reflects how much thinking went into the parts you can't see, the data structure, the admin tooling, whether the code is something another developer could pick up later. Skipping that thinking is exactly how a project gets cheaper today and dramatically more expensive the day something needs to change.

The honest question to ask any quote isn't just what it costs to build. It's what it costs to change something in a year. A quote that hasn't thought about that question yet usually hasn't thought about much beyond the launch date.